This forthcoming conference will take place Wednesday 10th November - Friday 12th November. All sessions will take place online. A full programme can be found here

We cordially invite proposals to present at the 2020 History Department Postgraduate Conference, to be held in the Wolfson Research Exchange on Thursday 28^th and Friday 29^th May.

In previous years, the conference has served as an invaluable opportunity for postgraduate students to present and discuss their research in a supportive and intellectually stimulating environment. We thoroughly encourage all graduate students to attend and participate.

Submission Guidelines

Papers should be approximately 15 minutes in length. All papers will be organised into panels and will be followed by a further 30 minutes of questions and discussion led by the panel chair.

We welcome proposals from all current postgraduate students. Proposals should include the following information:

• Title
• Abstract: 300 words
• Biographical Statement: 100 words
• Summary: 50 words

Summaries will be used in the conference programme to describe each individual paper. They should briefly describe the main point your paper makes and why you feel this is significant.

All proposals should be submitted to pgconference2020@gmail.com by no later than Monday 23^rd March, 2020. Successful applicants will be informed by the end of April.

Contact

For general queries, please contact the organising committee at: pgconference2020@gmail.com

James Piggott, undergraduate student at the Warwick University History Department, has been selected to present at the British Conference of Undergraduate Research this April. James has provided the following information regarding his forthcoming presentation:

My presentation presents two related ideas. Firstly, video-games should be considered a historically-relevant medium, through their capacity to both generate narratives and lessons of the past. Subsequently, the issue of censorship – the doctoring of the past when creating said narratives – is equally detrimental to history within video-games as in alternative formats. The historical significance of censorship within video-games, however, has been largely ignored, due to the ‘trivial’ or ‘ludified’ nature of video-games. As a result, the trivialisation and undermining of the historical practice remains within video-games.

These arguments are covered over three sections. The first unpacks several criticisms of video-games, in turn showing the medium’s historical capacity. The second uses the example of Nazism to describe and explain the presence of censorship within video-games. The final section links these two ideas, discussing the historical impact of censorship within video-games, and why the ‘ludic frame’ of video-games seemingly shadows their equally significant ‘historical frame’.

I hope that, with this paper, video-games will be taken more seriously within academia. I hope to demonstrate their potential utility for the historical practice, and, subsequently, why protecting them from censorship is important. The historical field will be greatly enhanced when developers and historians are not fearful of presenting their novel or controversial arguments. If censorship is abhorrent in alternative historical formats, so should it be in video-games.

This will entail providing a brief 10 minute presentation to a variety of different undergraduate researchers and experts; there will then be time for a short Q&A afterwards to answer any queries or loose ends.

BCUR - the British Conference of Undergraduate Research - is a yearly conference aimed at promoting and sharing undergraduate research in all disciplines. It is a fantastic opportunity to receive feedback and interest in one's work, and to meet with fellow researchers and academics. This year, the conference is being hosted at the University of South Wales, and consists of both oral and poster presentations.

The Warwick History Department Postgraduate Conference 2016 has commenced with an opening address by Professor David Anderson, Director of Graduate Studies.
 

This weekend, 12th to the 13th June 2015, is the conference New Subjectivities, New Emotions, New Politics: Oppositional Politics and Counter-Cultures Across the Iron Curtain to be held at the Center for Interdisciplinary Polish Studies, Europe University Viadrina, Frankfurt/Oder, Germany.

The conference is co-organized by Joachim C. Häberlen (University of Warwick), Mark Keck-Szajbel (European University Viadrina, Frankfurt/Oder), and Kate Mahoney (University of Warwick), and the conference program is available online.

The forthcoming Cuban Research Forum Annual Conference at Nottingham University, on the 8th to the 10th September 2014, will feature a special panel to celebrate Alistair Hennessy on the 9th September 2014 from 3:30pm to 5:30pm. Please see the full conference programme for more details of this panel and the other events of the conference.

Alistair Hennessy joined Warwick’s History Department shortly after the University’s foundation and he retired as one of the Department’s longest-serving members. He began his academic career as an historian of modern Europe, but after writing an important book on republicanism in nineteenth-century Spain, his interest in the Hispanic world broadened to encompass the history of Latin America and the Americas more generally. In the course of a dynamic and fruitful career, he made a great contribution to developing Warwick’s reputation for innovative and engaging historical studies, and to widening the scope of American Studies in the UK.

His own special contribution was to engineer the establishment of the School of Comparative American Studies (CAS), a degree course which received its first students in 1974 and continues to flourish today. CAS was his brainchild and favourite venture, reflecting his desire to challenge conventional intellectual and disciplinary boundaries. He rejected Cold War categories which portrayed the world in terms of East and West and called attention to the significance of relations between North and South; he insisted that American history and American Studies had to be more than the study of the United States; he proposed the study of the Americas as whole, comparing where possible the histories and cultures of Latin America, the United States, Canada and the Caribbean; and, last but not least, he looked to the future by launching a degree which was multi-disciplinary and bilingual, with opportunities to learn Spanish, to take courses across departments, and to spend a year studying at a university in the Americas.

Never one to rest on his laurels, Alistair subsequently developed another branch of American studies at Warwick by playing a leading part in founding the Centre for Caribbean Studies, which in turn became a prominent focus for historical and literary work on the Caribbean. The CAS degree, his book The Frontier in Latin American History, his numerous essays and articles on subjects which ranged from the histories of Cuba and Anglo-Argentine relations to Latin American intellectuals and Chicano culture, together with the Caribbean Studies book series which he created and co-edited, all stand as testimony to the intellectual vision, passion and energy for which he will be long remembered.